The social science of food.

Ice_Cream

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

After gorging myself with the better half of 25 pounds of cherries last week there came a point where I could not put another cherry into my mouth. With the mercury rising the idea of making jam or a cherry pie seemed totally unappealing. What to do?

I've always loved, loved, loved frozen treats. Popsicles in particular. These cherry popsicles have strained yogurt and a touch of cream for a cool, luscious treat.

Strain yogurt. Do this by pouring about 1 cup of plain yogurt into a mesh strainer lined with heavy duty paper towel or cheesecloth. Place the strainer over a bowl and leave in the refrigerator overnight. You could also use Greek style yogurt and skip this step.

Heat water, sugar, and honey on medium heat just until the sugar dissolves. Remove from heat. Set aside and let cool to slightly warm or room temp.

Put sugar mixture and pitted cherries in a food processor and process until smooth. Strain the mixture. Whisk together the strained cherry juice with the yogurt and heavy cream. Pour into your popsicle mold and freeze. Once set, enjoy!

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

We've been a bit disappointed with the food scene in London. It's true you can get just about anything you want, but the quality and price of food in the grocery stores and restaurants often falls far from our least expectations. That being said we have found a few gems in the Big Old Smoke. One such gem, just a few blocks away from our apartment flat is Andrew Edmunds*. It's a tiny candle-lit place with tables squashed together and squeezed in corners. The food, however, is pretty darn good and on one recent visit I tried the Brown Bread Ice Cream. I had never had it and the server told me it was from Victorian times where old toasted bread was stirred into vanilla ice cream. I had to give it a go - it was delicious! I've never seen it on any other menu and haven't seen it in any ice cream shops in England so I wanted to try making it at home.

First step, make some brown bread. I wanted something moist and easy to crumble so I made my Irish Soda Bread. This is the simplest bread to make (taking mere minutes to stir together) and absolutely heaven to eat warm from the oven. Would be a perfect too for a certain holiday that falls tomorrow. If you don't have the time, energy, tools to make ice cream for the Brown Bread Ice cream you must still do the following: (1) make this bread and eat the better part of it minutes out of the oven, standing at the kitchen counter with a huge slab of softened butter; (2) save a few bits of bread to make the brown bread crumbs (recipe below); (3) stir into your favorite store-bought vanilla ice cream (softened); (4) freeze it for a bit and enjoy your Brown Bread Ice Cream.

If you do have the time, energy, and tools to make ice cream at home use this ice cream base recipe - it's basically a vanilla ice cream base, but some of the regular sugar is replaced with dark brown sugar.

BROWN BREAD ICE CREAM BASE

2 cup heavy cream

1 cup whole milk

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar

1/2 vanilla bean

pinch salt

6 egg yolks

1x Brown Bread Crumbs (recipe follows)

METHOD

Heat cream, milk, sugars, vanilla bean (scraped and leave pod in pot) and salt. Heat the mixture to a scald. Meanwhile whisk egg yolks. Temper the eggs with the hot mixture. Put everything back on a low heat to thicken the mixture so it coats the back of a spoon. Strain. Chill mixture. Spin the ice cream following your ice cream machine's instructions. Just as it is done spinning, add most of the brown bread crumbs, reserving some for garnish. Keep in freezer till ready to serve.

BROWN BREAD CRUMBS

3 oz (2-3 slices) brown bread

1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar

1 1/2 oz unsalted butter

METHOD

Preheat oven to 350ºF/175ºC. Crumble brown bread between your fingers - some should be like sand, other like small pebbles. Because my bread is so moist using your hands will be possible if you use my Irish Soda Bread recipe. If you use another brown or whole wheat bread you may need to use a food processor. Melt butter and brown sugar on low heat till sugar is melted and the mixture barely comes to a bubble. Put brown bread crumbs in a heat safe bowl and pour the brown sugar+butter mixture over top. Stir in till well mixed. Place on a sheet pan lined with parchment (grease with a small bit flavorless oil) or use a silpat. Bake for about 15-20 minutes till edges crisp up. It will bake into one piece, but let it cool for a few minutes after it comes out of the oven and then crumble, leaving some bits larger than others. Do not use in the ice cream base until it is completely cooled. Reserve some crumbs for garnish.

These brown bread crumbs are pretty delicious and I can see them making an appearance as a crumble topping for lots of sweets, especially as the streusel for a coffee cake or jam tart.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

When I want to make a quick and simple dessert an apple crisp always comes to mind. Peel and slice up a few apples, toss with lemon, cinnamon, brown sugar, a smidge of flour and a sprinkle of salt. For the top - a few oats, almond flour, a bit more flour, sugar, salt, and butter to keep it crumbly and crisp, and in the oven. Done. Maybe some ice cream on top and everyone is happy. What could be even easier with a similar result? Brown Betty.

Brown Betty is the girl next door you never really think about, or talk to your friends about. You're not attracted to her at first sight, but you love it when you run into her and exchange hellos. Then one day, you hang out with her, spending some serious time and you can't believe you never noticed how amazing she really is. She doesn't require copious amounts of effort. She's perfect - never too much or over the top. You can bring her home to mom, but your friends think she's great too. Brown Betty is the dessert that is never really craved or swooned over, but when it's there you can't imagine life with her.

Brown Betty is way easier than pie and doesn't really require much of a recipe. To start, cube day-old brioche bread, or a mixture of country white bread and croissants into 1/2 inch cubes. You could also do this with fresh bread, just cut and cube a few hours before and set out to dry the bread a bit. Then, in a bowl, peel and slice tart apples. They should be sliced relatively thin - if they are too thick they won't soften enough by the time the bread on top browns. Toss apple slices with a squeeze of lemon, a generous amount of cinnamon, a bit of clove and nutmeg, brown sugar, vanilla extract, and a splash of brandy or calvados. Toss together and set aside. In a pot melt and brown butter. When the butter starts to brown and get nutty, pour most of the butter over the cubed bread and toss together. Reserve a bit of brown butter for sprinkling on top. In a buttered baking dish, layer the now brown buttered bread and/or croissant cubes with apples, starting and ending with the bread cubes. Sprinkle the remaining butter over top. You could sprinkle a bit of turbinado sugar on top as well, but it's not necessary. Bake in a 350F oven, for about 30 minutes. The apples should be soft, but not mushy, and the bread cubes on top should be a golden brown.

As a general guide I used a mixture of 6 cups of cubed white bread and croissants. I also used 6 apples, juice of 1 lemon, 1/4 cup brown sugar (add more if you like your desserts on the sweeter side), 1 Tablespoon of cinnamon, pinch each of nutmeg, clove and salt (use whatever spices you like with apples), 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, 2 Tablespoons of calvados (if you don't want to use alcohol fresh apple juice is fine, but it does need a bit of liquid), and 4 ounces of butter. This fit perfectly in an medium-depth 8x8 inch baking dish.

Serve warm, with or without fresh heavy cream or vanilla ice cream. The bottom layer of bread soaks up all the cinnamony apple juice that caramelizes a bit while the top is crisp and buttery. It's understated, but perfect on a cool fall day.

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

If you've grown up in the states and haven't been to San Francisco you probably think of the Golden Gate - glorious isn't it?

And maybe that it's full of liberal, free-thinking hippies. That might not be entirely off base, but politics aside, you most certainly know its the place where Rice-A-Roni comes from - a.k.a. The San Francisco Treat. Go ahead, sing the little tune and imagine the little trolley car bell ringing at the end.

I've actually "enjoyed" a box or two of the stuff, but there is an entirely different treat, whose home is also most definitely San Francisco, that gives Rice-A-Roni a run for its money. That treat would be the It's It. It's basically ice cream sandwiched between two old-fashioned oatmeal cookies and entirely coated in dark chocolate. Known as the "official food of San Francisco", the It's It was invented by George Whitney in 1928 and for decades sold exclusively at San Francisco's Playland. Whitney, Playland, and the It's It have quite a history and one of my dearest blogging friends, OysterCulture, has written a fabulous post that will most likely teach a local San Franciscan a thing or two.

OysterCulture and I have a shared obsession with the wonders of San Francisco so when she asked if I could come up with a homemade It's It recipe I jumped at the challenge. It's It are quite San Franciscan. It's easy to get them in the San Francisco Bay Area, but as you venture further afield they are difficult to come across and usually only the true San Franciscans know about them. You can mail order them in the US from the company, which sits just by the 101 highway a few miles south of the San Francisco airport. But its quite easy to make them at home - a bit multi-step, but totally worth it.

The first step is the make or purchase one or all of the following ice cream flavors: Vanilla, Chocolate, Mint, or Coffee (for Cappuccino). Each It's It is one of the four aforementioned flavors. No exceptions. And NO, you can't substitute a different flavor. The beauty of the It's It is that there isn't 31+ flavors. If you need an ice cream recipe you can use my mint chip recipe. Remove chocolate chips and mint for vanilla, or make it just mint.

The second step is to make the Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Cookies. It's almost a shame this cookie recipe makes its debut as part of an It's It post. The entire It's It package trumps anything else, but these oatmeal cookies are perfection. I'm usually quite humble, but this oatmeal cookie is damn good. I can not keep a secret, especially a good one. In this case you should be very happy that I can't keep my mouth shut.

OLD-FASHIONED OATMEAL COOKIES

These cookies don't need to be muddled with chocolate chips or my evil nemesis raisins (had to pick 20 of them out of my bulgar salad at lunch yesterday). Though, if you want, it will happily accept the addition of such things. I don't add raisins to my oatmeal cookies and refuse to test recipes that do, so I suppose a handful will do. Oh, by the way, Whitney never made an It's It with an oatmeal raisin cookie. Moving on!

4 1/2 oz unsalted butter, room temp

1/2 c light brown sugar

1/4 c granulated sugar

1 egg, room temp

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 c whole-wheat flour

1/2 c all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

1 c old-fashioned oats

METHOD

Preheat oven to 350F. Sift together all dry ingredients. Cream together butter and sugars. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Add the dries and mix until just combined. Mix in the oats. Scoop onto a cookie sheet lined with waxed parchment. Use a small ice cream scoop to make uniform cookies. I used a cookie scoop that is 1 Tbs by volume. This makes 32 cookies and or 16 It's Its. Bake for 8-10 minutes. Do not over-bake, if anything, gently under-bake.

It's important that all the cookies are the same size and perfectly round. The moment they come out of the oven, gently shape into a perfect round with a biscuit cutter. Use one that is a little bigger than the cookie.

Set aside to cool. Once the cookies have cooled take the ice cream out of the freezer for 10 minutes to soften. Put ice cream in a piping bag with a large tip. Pipe ice cream on each under side of the cookie. You might have to do this in groups if the ice cream is melting, or place ice cream in freezer for a few minutes if too soft to pipe.

Press two ice cream piped sides together to create the perfect height. Use a small offset spatula to make sure ice cream is flush with the cookies. Freeze the sandwiches till hard. Melt dark chocolate in a double boiler. Use good quality chocolate or couverture (has a higher cocoa butter content and will make the final It's It look and taste better). Dip the ice cream sandwiches in the chocolate. I usually dip each side and then roll on its side to coat the sides. Immediately place on a silpat lined sheet and place in freezer. When its set, eat!

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Oh, how fickle I am. A post ago I was talking up the joys of fall. Then I realized its been raining six out of the last seven days. And yesterday, it was so windy no amount of protective rain gear kept me from getting soaked. So my mind wandered, as it often does, to some place sunny and hot. Mint chip ice cream essential in my fantasy to cool me down.

MINT CHIP ICE CREAM

2 c heavy cream

1 c whole milk

3/4 c sugar

pinch salt

3 c mint leaves, loosely packed

6 large egg yolks

1/2 c dark chocolate chips (chopped Valhrona Guanaja is my pick!)

METHOD

Heat cream, milk, sugar and salt. Just as the edges simmer take off the heat and add all the mint leaves. Stir in and cover with plastic wrap to steep. Set aside for one hour. Strain and add remaining one cup cream. Heat the mixture again (just to a scald). Meanwhile whisk egg yolks. Temper the eggs with the hot mixture. Thicken the mixture over low heat just enough to coat the back of a spoon. Strain a second time. Chill mixture. Spin the ice cream following your ice cream machine's instructions. Fold in chocolate chips and put in freezer. Makes about 2 pints of ice cream. Let harden a bit and eat!

This ice cream is absolutely fabulous. I love the minty-ness with the dark chocolate. A match made in heaven. Unless you use artificial coloring its hard to get the "mint green" color. I opt out of food coloring - the mint flavor is absolutely unmistakable if you follow this recipe.